Sales

Category archives for Sales

I’ve toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It’s geeky fun, but not especially quantitative. Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!

Having seen other authors led into destruction by responding to customer reviews on Amazon, I tend to approach the customer reviews of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with some trepidation. It turns out, though, that they’re really good. And I don’t mean that in a Harriet Kalunser kind of way– the positive reviews…

We’re once again in the “things are in the pipeline, but nothing has been posted recently” mode, which is a good excuse for some Amazon neepery. Since the AP review came out, and was printed in 20-odd papers, the sales rank has climbed back into the four digits, and has spent the last few days…

The college bookstore has set up a display table right at the front of the store with a bunch of copies of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is kind of a kick. Some of my students asked me about it in lab yesterday. The big news, though, is that the Associated Press…

The Barnes and Noble store finder finally indicated the presence of copies in the local stores yesterday, so we made a trip down to the Colonie Center, where they had a half-dozen face out in the Physics section, and probably 15-20 on the new releases table. Woo-hoo! (Now I can shift to fretting that they’ve…

A couple of nifty bits of news from the British Commonwealth: The BBC’s Magazine Monitor blog noted my Seed article. Better yet, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog makes Smriti Daniel’s list of “the best books to emerge in 2009″ in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. The other books on the list: The…

Even when I’m on the road, I continue to be obsessed… A nice review at Lean Left that really gets Emmy’s role in the book: The dog asks clear questions and Orzel uses those interjections well. They very often serve as a way to clarify, or to bring up questions that the readers probably has,…

Miscellaneous book-related items for you to read while I spend most of the day in transit to Austin: While I have yet to see a copy in a Barnes and Noble store locally, it’s selling well enough in the national chain for them to have ordered more copies. Yay! Relatedly, the publisher has just ordered…

Two new links for today’s Obsessive Update: The first is a nice article from Union’s press office, with the headline “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but what about physics?”. I spent half an hour or so talking with one of the staff writers (who has a science background, which is a nice…

Not much news on the book front this morning– various promotional things are in progress, including an on-campus thing tomorrow afternoon, but there’s nothing new to link to. We do, however, have the first non-mammal added to the DogPhysics Pet Gallery: a lizard, sent in by Marcella McIntyre. It’s not actually a pet, per se,…

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing